The Brownstone at Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) is both familiar to many, and shrouded in mystery. Most are familiar with this wing of the school, home to practice rooms, dance studios, and administrative offices. Yet, the former mansion holds hidden gems inaccessible to students.

“If you go to the Brownstone attic, there’s all these fireplaces for the servants and for the children who used to live up there. It looks just like it looked 50 years ago, and it’s amazing that it’s stayed that way,” said Michael Solomon, TWIGS parent liaison and de facto BSA historian.

The Brownstone – historically known as the William H. Graham House at 704 Cathedral Street – was commissioned in the 1850s by George Brown, heir to the Alex. Brown & Sons banking fortune.

Graham was Brown’s son-in-law, and a future director of Alex. Brown. The Graham house was one of three identical houses on the 700 block, and our Brownstone was built by Brown for Graham and his family.

Where BSA’s main building stands now used to be another Brownstone near-identical to the Graham house. That Brownstone was razed in 1924 to make way for the Alcazar, a hotel that BSA took over when the school opened in 1979.

In addition, the house at 702 Cathedral Street, immediately south of our Brownstone, used to have the exact same facade as the 704 building. The facade was changed when the Christian Science Church purchased and converted it into a reading room in the 1920s.

The artist behind the Italianate architectural beauty of our Brownstone (and likely the other two), is Edmund G. Lind, who also designed parts of the nearby First and Franklin Presbyterian Church and Peabody Institute. (Some apocryphal accounts mistakenly list the architect as Joseph F. Kemp, who built Camden Station by Inner Harbor, but he was an associate of Lind’s in the local architectural society.)

Once the Graham family moved out, the Brownstone was converted into upscale apartments. One particularly notable resident was H.L. Mencken, a renowned author and journalist who moved to 704 Cathedral Street with his wife in the 1930s.

Our Brownstone held a special place in Mencken’s life. He was a lifelong bachelor, living in his childhood home in Union Square for most of his life, until he met Sara Haardt, an English professor at Goucher College and staunch suffragette. They married in 1930 and moved to the Graham house for five years, where they hosted esteemed writers from across the country.

“Their dining room is now the TWIGS office, and the Foundation office was their living room. Guests would eat here. Famous writers of all sorts had dinner here,” Solomon explained.

However, Haardt’s long battle with tuberculosis culminated with her death in 1935. A grief-stricken Mencken left 704 Cathedral Street and returned to his childhood home, where he lived until his death.

Through the rest of the twentieth century, the Brownstone went through the possession of numerous commercial buyers, and BSA finally acquired it in 2008 from the eccentric writer Larry Glass.

But the school’s transaction with Glass was not easy. Solomon recounted a story from founding Theatre Department head Donald Hicken, explaining Glass’s feud with the school:

“When they opened the school, the Brownstone still belonged to Larry Glass. He came over the first week of school in a bathrobe and his bathing suit. He went into [founding director] David Simon’s office, and said, ‘Hi, I live next door, and the hotel always used to let me swim in their pool. I would like to continue doing so.’ Of course, Simon, who was a tough guy, threw Larry Glass out of the building: he said, ‘You can’t come here, there’s kids in here!’ And Larry Glass was so resentful of that, he would not sell the Brownstone to us.”

Yet, in 2008, the City forced Glass’s hand, and the house was promptly renovated to build the dance studios and the hallway connecting the Brownstone to the Alcazar building.

Through two centuries of change, the Brownstone is still an intriguing place. The beautiful spiral staircase spanning three floors starkly contrasts with the haunting basement, where you’ll find dismembered mannequins and eerie lighting worthy of a horror film (Solomon swears he’s seen the Brownstone ghost wandering around down there, but thinks they live in the attic).

Perhaps the most magical part of the Brownstone is hidden away on the roof, where a tiny windowed hut sits to refract light onto the building’s stained glass ceiling. A wooden board now covers the glass in the hut, but students and staff alike can admire the stained glass just by looking up from the staircase.